evolution

Lawrence’s Free State High School is fighting an embarassing problem: rampant drunkenness at its own dances.

The response to this problem, as you might expect from the public school system, is to look good to as many parents as possible while shunting the problem off to someone else in the most expensive and inefficient manner possible: to require students to pass Breathalyzer tests in order to be admitted.

Prediction: attendance at the next dance will be low. Another prediction: Arrests and injuries resulting from drunk teenage drivers will rise slightly.

[Superintendent Randy] Weseman gave one possible scenario once the new policy is in place: Students will take a “passive” Breathalyzer, which checks air exhaled in front of the mouth. Those who fail the passive test would then take an “active” Breathalyzer, similar to that used by law enforcement.

Students would be tested before school dances and the prom, Lawrence High Principal Steve Nilhas said.

“This is a good-faith effort on the part of the district to address an issue that concerns us all,” Nilhas said.

“Good-faith,” maybe, but it’s ham-fisted and it will be ineffective. It will simply drive the safety problems elsewhere, and it will ignore other behavior and law-enforcement problems that I will address later.

The next quote worries me just a bit.

Educators in Topeka, DeSoto, Baldwin and Blue Valley districts said Thursday they did not require students to take Breathalyzers before dances.

“That’s pretty progressive,” said Alvie Cater, spokesman for the DeSoto district.

Well, “progressives” would rather throw more money at the school district than deal with the underlying problems, so I suppose he’s right.

Of course, our students are smarter than all that.

Reactions from students were mixed.

“Everybody is still going to come out and have a good time,” said Aisha Breckenridge, a Lawrence High senior.

But others predicted dance attendance would wane.

“People will probably stop coming to dances,” said Megan Glotzbach, a Lawrence High junior. “Some people might be offended because they don’t (drink) at all.”

Breathalyzers won’t stop kids from drinking, said Anna Allen, a Free State High junior.

“Kids will always find a way to do what they want to do,” she said.

Allen said a drop in attendance at dances would mean the schools would raise less money supporting the schools.

The next quote worries me as well, but I am heartened by the one after it from Superintendent Weseman, who almost gets it right.

Some parents welcomed news of the Breathalyzers.

“I think it’s appropriate,” said Travis Paustian, father of two Lawrence High students. “They’re underage and not supposed to be drinking, so they shouldn’t be ending up at the dances drunk.”

Weseman said the issue of underage drinking and drug use was not the schools’ responsibility alone.

“The question is, where are they getting this, and where are they doing it before they get into the dance?” he said. “There’s some enabling going on out there. … That’s an issue for the community to address.”

In the reader comments section, the first one is from a student who said, “I don’t think drugs or alcohol have any place at school, but that sounds somewhat ridiculous and expensive. The teachers should just use their best judgment when letting them in.”

I don’t mean to pick on Mr. Paustian, who undoubtedly is a fine parent and loves his children very much, but it’s not an issue for the schools so much as it is for Mr. Paustian and the other parents in his district. Perhaps “parents” is what Superintendent Weseman meant to say rather than “the community”. Many of these issues have been created by the philosophy that schools should act as surrogate parents (a task at which they fail spectacularly). I don’t believe, though, that in this day and age parents can do it alone. Here is how I propose to help them.

Most schools of any size have what’s known as a “school resource officer,” hereafter abbreviated SRO. The SRO is simply a member of the local police department whose duty post is the school building. The main purpose of the SRO is to deter petty crime and to give the kids some way of relating to police officers without having to be handcuffed and carted away in a squad car, something I think is a good idea.

Simply place the SRO and two or three certified staff in charge of admissions. If they even suspect alcohol is involved, then offer the students a choice: they can call a family member to come and get them, or they can take the passive test (which is presumably a relatively inexpensive hand unit; I hope to get reader input on that). If the passive test registers so much as a hint of alcohol, the SRO will say, “Fine. One of these teachers is going to escort you to the nearest phone, where the teacher will call your parents or guardians and tell them I am citing you for minor in possession.”

This solution should free the students who choose not to drink or act like idiots from what I consider to be an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. For the others, there is probable cause to charge them with minor in possession, and the teachers don’t need a reason to call a student’s parents (I spoke to my students’ parents and guardians often, and I spoke to all of them at least once for no reason at all other than to say hello).

Maybe the real solution to this and other education problems is for communities to stop focusing so much on the histrionics in Washington and direct that focus homeward. I think that would moderate some of the insane rhetoric I’ve been reading for the last year or so — after all, you have to be able to live in your communities, right? It would also improve things for our students, who are the smartest generation of Americans that has ever lived but are so bored that they turn to things like pop culture which glorifies the partying dilettante lifestyle.

UPDATE [09.10 16:15]: Here’s a different view from Dolph Simons, Jr., publisher of the Lawrence Journal-World.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 9th, 2005 at 11:30 and is filed under freedom, kansas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.